Announcements
Since Announcements appear immediately the moment the student logs into the course site, you will want to keep this page as clutter-free as possible. You should aim to keep all of your announcements viewable without forcing anyone to scroll down to see something. There are several ways to do this.
1) Keep your permanent Welcome message brief. Try to aim for no more than two or three lines of text. If possible, have only one permanent message.
2) Use the Calendar feature of Blackboard to remind students of important dates. These will appear on their Welcome, (Your Name) page and will act as instant reminders.
3) If you have specific tasks that you want to remind them about, use the Task feature in Bb. The task feature also allows you to set priorities for these tasks, most useful when assigning Group work (more on this in a later post). Tasks also appear on the Welcome page, and serve as constant reminders until the task is completed.
4) Create Folders in other areas of your course sites, place documents (all all media types) within these folders, and then use the Browse feature in Announcements to point to these files. Doing this saves much real estate space on your Announcements page.
5) Use the Assignments feature of Bb (as distinguished from the Assignments button) when creating assignments for your students. This feature will create both a temporary announcement with a link to the assignment and a gradebook entry. This is one of the best new features of Bb, and I encourage you to use it. You can find out more about it in the manual found through the course control panel.
6) On our development roadmap, we plan to eventually install a tool that will send announcements to students' mobile devices. Keeping your messages brief and organized in the fashion described above will do much to prepare the way for this development goal.
Since Announcements appear immediately the moment the student logs into the course site, you will want to keep this page as clutter-free as possible. You should aim to keep all of your announcements viewable without forcing anyone to scroll down to see something. There are several ways to do this.
1) Keep your permanent Welcome message brief. Try to aim for no more than two or three lines of text. If possible, have only one permanent message.
2) Use the Calendar feature of Blackboard to remind students of important dates. These will appear on their Welcome, (Your Name) page and will act as instant reminders.
3) If you have specific tasks that you want to remind them about, use the Task feature in Bb. The task feature also allows you to set priorities for these tasks, most useful when assigning Group work (more on this in a later post). Tasks also appear on the Welcome page, and serve as constant reminders until the task is completed.
4) Create Folders in other areas of your course sites, place documents (all all media types) within these folders, and then use the Browse feature in Announcements to point to these files. Doing this saves much real estate space on your Announcements page.
5) Use the Assignments feature of Bb (as distinguished from the Assignments button) when creating assignments for your students. This feature will create both a temporary announcement with a link to the assignment and a gradebook entry. This is one of the best new features of Bb, and I encourage you to use it. You can find out more about it in the manual found through the course control panel.
6) On our development roadmap, we plan to eventually install a tool that will send announcements to students' mobile devices. Keeping your messages brief and organized in the fashion described above will do much to prepare the way for this development goal.
return to TABLE of CONTENTS CUNY Online Instructors Manual: Pedagogy and Practice